Apparently, food banks in the state already collect freshly
killed wild animals from the highways, clean and dress them, and
distribute them to the poor, so Montana HB247 simply legalises common practice.

As demonstrated by an interactive map created by Marketplace,
several states already have similar laws on the books. Florida is
the most permissive: according to Marketplace, “If you
hit a deer, it’s legal to take it home and do whatever you want
with it. You don’t need permission.”

Most states with roadkill bills do require drivers to notify the
authorities; for example, in New York state, residents can
salvage deer, moose, or bear from the highway, but only if the
collision is reported and deemed to be accidental. A handful of
other states expressly forbid the collection and consumption of
roadkill, including, somewhat counter-intuitively, that
well-known home of guns, “freedom,” and feral hogs, Texas.

In some rural counties in Alaska and Vermont, you can even add
your name and number to roadkill phone trees: the state game warden will give you a call when there’s
a fresh moose or deer “that’s not too smooshed.”

Opinions are sharply divided as to the desirability of eating
roadkill.

PETA endorses it, saying that, “If people
must eat animal carcasses, roadkill is a superior option to the
neatly shrink-wrapped plastic packages of meat in the
supermarket.” Fans point out that, as an alternative
protein source, roadkill is free, naturally lean, raised without
the energy and chemical-intensive inputs of farmed livestock, and
avoids waste (though this last point seems moot, as there are
several other species that are only too happy to dine on the
flattened fauna that humans leave in their wake).

As far as taste goes, Alaskan roadkill aficionados describe moose as “like hamburger, but with
more flavour,” and savour the animal’s gelatinous nose, while
British conservationist and regular roadkill consumer Jonathan
McGowan sang the praises of the UK’s squashed birds and mammals
to The Ecologist magazine last year:

I’m a sucker for deer and pheasant though, and I love fox. It’s
delicious – like a very lean, sweet tasting pork. Similar to rat
actually.

A deer that’s been slammed by a car might not have all that much
edible meat. “Blood will go into that muscle and that meat is no
good,” says Nick Bennett, who owns
Montana Mobile Meats and processes wild game. Just how much
meat you can get out of the roadkill depends on exactly where and
how hard you hit it.

One of the more interesting aspects of the media coverage is
discovering just how common car-animal collisions are. A
spokeswoman for insurance company State Farm told Marketplace that they estimate “one
and a quarter million drivers every year have some sort of
altercation with a deer while in their car” in the United States.
The Ecologist reports that “The
Mammal Society estimates that some 100,000 foxes, 50,000 badgers
and between 30,000 and 50,000 deer are killed on UK roads every
year.”

For retired biology professor Roger M. Knutson, the
Michigan-based founder of the International Simmons Society for
the study of flattened fauna, this ubiquity speaks to roadkill’s
larger importance. In his book, Flattened Fauna: A Field Guide to Common
Animals of Roads, Streets, and Highways, he notes that
“those (up to now) non-descript spots and blotches of fur,
feathers, and scales are the wildlife we see most often, yet
nowhere has there been a guide to their identification.”

Knutson’s approach to the thirty-six most common North American
roadkill specimens is that of a naturalist (albeit one with his
tongue firmly in cheek), rather than a gourmet. As more and more
people live in cities and biodiversity shrinks, squashed animals
seem to be bucking the trend, rising in numbers — although, as
Knutson laments, both historical and current data on roadkill is
thin:

At a time when the total world fauna is surely shrinking in both
absolute numbers and species complexity, the road fauna is
clearly increasing. Before 1900, in the United States, its
presence was recorded by only the most fragmentary references to
the occasional horse-stomped snake. With the development in the
twentieth century of a much elongated road network and
dramatically increased traffic speed, the flattened fauna has
increased in both species and total numbers.

Knutson cites an early count, in the “1938 classic, Feathers and Fur on the Turnpike,”
in which New Englander James Simmons (in whose honour the Simmons
Society is named) measured a density of 0.429 dead organisms per
mile. A more recent study in Nebraska suggests that roadkill
density may since have risen to 4.10 animals per mile. “This
means,” Knutson notes, “that a trip of 1,000 miles could be the
occasion for seeing, identifying, and even enjoying anywhere from
400 to 4,000 animals.”

An extremely slim paperback, Flattened Fauna is nonetheless full
of gems: Knutson’s sense of humour belies his detailed study of
the “remarkable persistence” of muskrats on even the busiest
motorways, the unfortunate tendency of cold-blooded snakes to
seek large, flat, sun-warmed surfaces at night, and the
particular silhouette or “form toward which” each different
animal tends, in its two-dimensional afterlife (“genuine
dorsi-ventral flattening is uncommon for rabbits,” for example).
Indeed, the study of roadkill has a serious use, beyond
entertainment value: as biologist Bob Brockieexplained to Radio New Zealand’s This Way Upprogramme a couple of years ago, counting squashed
animals on the road provides an excellent guide to shifts in
population numbers and migration patterns.

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of both roadkill cuisine and
roadkill safaris, however, is what it tells us about the car’s
influence on our changing relationship with animals. In Flattened Fauna, Knutsen speculates
that “if the road habitat and its major selective pressure —
fast-moving vehicles — were to persist,” we might expect to see
the emergence of characteristics related to successful highway
negotiation. Indeed, though with a certain degree of scepticism,
Knutsen quotes Victor B. Sheffer, author of Spires of Form, Glimpses of
Evolution, who believes that “hedgehogs have learned
genetically, within our century, to run from approaching
automobiles instead of curling up in the defensive posture of
their pre-auto ancestors.”

As for humans, as Knutson notes, many of us will drive at least
two hundred miles, passing anything from five to twenty-five
squashed animals, for every mile we walk in the natural world,
observing live animals. Given our lifestyles, it seems only
logical that we learn to extend our appreciation of animals to
their two-dimensional forms — with, of course, the help of his
book, “which is devoted to making the experience of seeing dead
animals on the road meaningful, even enjoyable.”

Meanwhile, having domesticated both ourselves and our food
supply, we could perhaps argue that the underground popularity of
roadkill cuisine is a technologically enhanced resurgence of our
inner hunter-gatherers — even if the hunting is being done, for
the most part, from the leather seats of a four-wheel drive.
Although Montana’s new law has apparently been written to
discourage intentional collisions, examples have been reported of
roadkill poachers, who, rather than using a
bow and arrow or gun, simply put a jam sandwich or sausage roll
on the road as bait, and then lie low waiting for a passing
vehicle to kill their dinner for them.

Hours of study have been devoted to understanding the ways in
which cars have reshaped the built environment, our perception of
space and time, and even the global atmosphere; perhaps roadkill
provides a small, easily overlooked example of some of the ways
they have also redesigned our relationship with the animal world?